SLANDER IN THE MIDDLE AGES. By Prof. F. W. Maitland. TT seems to be a common opinion that
- - English mediaeval law gave no remedy
for slander or libel. For his soul's salva tion the defamer might indeed be chastened by the ecclesiastical courts; but they could give no damages to the defamed, and the pleasure, such as it is, of seeing one's ad versary doing penance in a white sheet can hardly be reckoned as a legal remedy for the wrong that he has done, the pecuniary loss that he has very possibly occasioned. A great deal might be said in support of this opinion. In the first place the silence of the Year Books, save just the last,1 is very significant; nor can we argue that men may well have brought actions for de famation without raising any points of law that were thought worthy of being reported, for soon after the Year Books have come to an end the reports begin to teem with such actions. Add to this that the law as we see it in these reports seems very young and unsettled; the courts are only begin ning to draw those distinctions between slander and libel, between " words that are actionable per se " and " words that are ac tionable with special damage," which be come the main outlines of the law of later days, and they seem to be much troubled by the notion that many kinds of defamatory imputations are " merely spiritual," and are within the legitimate province of the Courts Christian. The statutes about " scandalum magnatum," again, cannot be appealed to as showing that an invasion of the right to one's good name has been regarded as an actionable tort; they protect none but the great men, and seem to be directed rather against sedition and turbulence than against ordinary defamation. Once more, when the action for defamation does appear, it is an action on the special case, " an 1 Year Book, 27 Hen. VIII. f. n, 14.
action on the case for words," and from this we might infer that it was a compara tively new action; the Chancery had not among its old formulas any that would meet the very common case of one who has suf fered from a slander. Then, again, if we will go back to remote times we may read the very curious case of Vcsey v. Fitz Thomas, which fills a large space on the Parliament Rolls of 1294 and 1295. 1 William de Vesey brought an action for defamation {super diffamatione) against John Fitz Thomas before the king's Council in Ireland. The defamation consisted of a charge of treason lodged by Fitz Thomas against Vesey before the king's Council in England. Fitz Thomas did not admit that he had done exactly what Vesey charged him with doing, but added that if pressed he had more to say. Thereupon he pro ceeded to charge Vesey with having spoken certain treasonable words about the king, saying among other things that King Ed ward was the most cowardly knight of his realm. Vesey then gave the lie to Fitz Thomas as to a false traitor, and offered to defend by his body. Thus the action for slander seems to have been converted into an appeal of treason. The battle was waged, but before it was fought the king caused the record to be removed from Ire land to England, where, after many delays, the whole process was annulled by the king and Council as full of errors. The first and foremost of these errors was that the case had begun with a charge of defamation, "and it is not used in this realm that pleas of defamation should be pleaded in the king's court (' non sit usitatum in regno isto placitare in curia Regis placita de defamationibus ')." Doubtless there were many good reasons of policy why -Vesey and Fitz 1 Rolls of Parliament, i. 127, 132.
